The District of Columbia Department of Human Services has been committed to protecting older and vulnerable adults since establishing its Adult Protective Services (APS) in 1985. However, in 2017, the agency stepped up its commitment by moving to the Structured Decision Making® (SDM) system of resea…

Not long after joining NCCD nearly a year ago, I had the opportunity to participate in my first onsite work visit: to observe colleagues delivering safety-organized practice training to child protection supervisors in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A lifelong Midwesterner, it was my first time in the stat…

There is currently great interest in the child welfare field in using predictive analytics, spurred on by "big data," to help children and families. But how do we mitigate the risks? In this new paper, NCCD lays out principles for product development, evaluation, and practice to use predictive analy…

The United States imprisons its people at an unprecedented rate never seen in human history. It leads the world in the highest rates of incarceration, imprisoning a staggering 25% of the world’s prison population and creating what is currently known as mass incarceration.
The battle cry has been sum…

Since the 1980s, the number of incarcerated Americans has exploded. During that time period, the number of incarcerated women has increased at a rate nearly double that of incarcerated men, making women the fastest-growing population in prison.
Yet women remain largely hidden from view in public dis…

When I was a kid growing up in the Midwest I learned about four oceans: the Atlantic Ocean off the East Coast, the Pacific Ocean out by California, the Arctic Ocean in the frozen North, and the Indian Ocean on the other side of the world. This made sense because it helped orient me on a globe, but i…

Expanding Wisconsin’s prisons is the wrong way to address the growing prison population. Department of Corrections (DOC) Secretary Jon Litscher is right about the need for relief, but increasing prison space—as he proposed in October—is a shortsighted and costly approach. Fortunately, DOC, our court…

More than 53,000 people in Texas, and more than 1.5 million nationwide, live today under a court-ordered guardianship, with their basic rights—like deciding where they live, how they spend their money, and who they see—entrusted to someone else. It’s a tremendous power wielded by judges who must qui…

According to a compilation of data collected by the Scripps-Howard News service, from 1980 to 2008 close to 185,000 homicide cases in the United States went unsolved, and the data showed major disparities between the resolution of cases involving black and white victims. From 1990 until the near pre…

Advocates for curbing mass incarceration have succeeded in transforming the issue from a niche topic into a mainstream political movement. The movement has called out racial disparities in the system, the long-term effects on entire neighborhoods over generations, and the profiteering by private com…